


and why the sea is boiling hot

by madamboogie



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:02:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25678549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamboogie/pseuds/madamboogie
Summary: She got the ladybug tattoo on the back of her right shoulder first, a drunken but serious attempt to ground herself and remember who she was: Lydia Montrose, Bitch Girl Wonder of the Tri-State Area, affectionately known since childhood as “Ladybug” to her parents and older brothers.It was only after several months had passed that she gave the ladybug a friend: a greenish-brown beetle, perched on the back of her left shoulder. She sketched out the little guy for the tattoo artist herself, giving explicit instructions on color and style, and watched the entire thing done in a mirror.The beetle was her reminder – her feet weren’t on the ground at all.---------(Everyone:Me: So I finally wrote that reincarnation fic you all wanted.)
Relationships: John Lennon/Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	1. Pre-Face the Music

“ _I was dreaming of the past_

_And my heart was beating fast_

_I began to lose control_

_I began to lose control…_ ”

Wonsaponatime and a _very_ time it was, there lived in a smoky earl gray city four nicens little boys (though to be bus fare, they were sometimes nice and sometimes haughty) and those four boys sang and played music like angles. They weren’t square, though they were four, but after maching much schau for several years they eventually became all shapes to all steeple.

Though these boys were all very different, they got on like a house on fire. There was Gorge son-of-Hari-long-may-he-rain, thin as a railroad, toothy as a Hollywood vampire, born with a guitar in hand that he could play before he even spoke in America. There was the Ringo Kid, gun-totin’ sharp-shootin’ cowpoke (so he dreamt), who set down his spurs and picked up some drumsticks and there they still are to this day, amen. There was the Great Speccy Git himself, fat old Jock Lemon, but that’s quite enough about him. And last but certainly not beast there was Mack Charmly, a boy of too much muchness: much too pretty, much too talented, much too kind, and you could hate him or love him but he remained simply too _much_.

So. The four boys, by name known and renowned, created music the girls went mad for, and all was going rather splendidly until it bade the four boys to go mad too. The four boys (such nice boys they were, and so generous to their butchers) then went their separate ways and means, singing their own songs and banging their own gongs, but maybe in the backs of their minds (back with the cheese and onions) there was a feeling that someday, the four would once again come together right now over lunch.

But all that wishing and hoping and thinking was for knot, because then the Terrible Thing happened one cold December night to fat old Jock Lemon – who was factually not old at all. It was a terrible thing we won’t speak of, the Terrible Thing, pins and needles to say the four boys became three, and those three very sad indeed. They had to endure questions about Jock, and see Jock’s face day in and day out, day up and day down, knowing he was gone and they’d never see him again. It was a painful way to live, was life without young Jock Lemon, may he rest in peas and karats.

Yet here’s where we start our story, Mere Reader: the moment when things changed for the three nice boys from the pearl grey city, now three tired men of the wide-awake world. For somehow – magically, confidentially, hydroponically even – that fourth boy, Jock Lemon? He came back. He got back to the world and to the three nice men once his friends, and oh the things he had done, and oh the things she had seen…


	2. FIRSTLY: a Diversion

**FIRSTLY, a diversion:** Being a portrait of the artist as a young girl, Lydia Grace Montrose, Bitch Girl Wonder of the Tri-State Area, Esq., BSC, CIA, MPhil, AG, RN (“Wait, but who’s Phil?” said little Nicola)

Wonsaponatime there was in the sleepy town of Westchester, New York, the land of many bedrooms, a fine pair named Alan and Carol Montrose. Alan was an architect of some fame, having designed several prominent buildings that won some awards, and Carol had worked on the Apollo 11 launch at NASA back in her salad days, though now she was all mom. They were the parents of two well-behaved boys, Scott and Travis – well-behaved only in the sense that they knew to follow the rules when their parents were looking. Otherwise, they did exactly as boys do.

Alan and Carol and Scott and Travis were set to add to their family unit in January of 1981, a new bundle of joy that would make their band complete. But lo, what should happen but the stork came early, and on December 14, 1980 – so soon after that rock star was assassinated in cold blood, what a Terrible Thing that was – Alan and Carol had their first and only daughter, a girl they called Lydia Grace, in a hospital in the City. Little Lydia, though slightly premature, was a fighter (that’s what the NICU nurses liked to say, “She’s a fighter!” but Travis thought she just looked like a shriveled red blob) and though she wailed her little lungs out she lived, and survived, and thrived like she took the challenge personally. Her mother counted all her fingers and toes and, satisfied, declared her sweet girl quite perfect.

But Lydia the Perfect Infant grew up to be Lydia the Peculiar Child. Lydia was a year old the first time she heard one specific song come on the car radio (we won’t name it here, out of deference to her), and when she started screaming bloody murder Carol pulled over to the side of the road thinking her daughter was being attacked. When it seemed she was, in fact, entirely fine and not violently dying, Carol pulled back onto the road and thought no more of it – until it happened again, five months later, while Alan was out in his workshop listening to the radio and that same song came on. Lydia immediately fell to the ground, limp with hysteria as she wept and wept.

No doctor could find anything wrong with her. All their various tests came out normal, and Lydia seemed to be a bright and inquisitive child just like any other. But Alan and Carol became more careful in playing radios around the house, and they even had Scott get rid of his copy of the record it appeared on. Just in case, you know, though no one could guess why a love song from years before Lydia’s birth would make the girl react so severely. Maybe it was something about the timbre of the instruments? The singer’s voice? No one could rightly or wrongly say.

In between bouts of inexplicable tears, someone put a crayon in Lydia’s hand and she started drawing. Her work began as wobbly scribbles typical of any elementary school-aged child, but it _very_ rapidly became something else, something revealing an incredible, natural artistic talent. Alan, an artist at heart himself, was thrilled to nurture her skill as a budding fellow creative, and pinned her drawings all over both of his offices, at work and home. She had an inimitable style already formed at the age of six, and by seven she was drawing what would become her most frequent (yet enigmatic) recurring character: the Skeptical Man.

“But why d’you call him that?” Travis once asked her, as he frowned at her latest drawing. The Skeptical Man was seated in a large stretch of grass, legs stretched out before him, a big shaggy dog resting partially across his lap. “He doesn’t look skeptical. He doesn’t have a face, all he’s got is that one eyebrow.”

“No, he _is_ ,” Lydia insisted. “I know how he feels, I always know.”

“He doesn’t even have a mouth or eyes, dummy!”

“Now wait a minute,” Alan interjected firmly, seeing his two youngest coming close to a shouting match. “Let’s hear what Lydia has to say. How can you tell how he feels, Ladybug?”

“Because his eyebrow,” she declared, chin tilted at a defiant angle. “This eyebrow always gives away how he feels, and here” – she stabbed her finger at her drawing – “it’s _obvious_ that somebody said something and he doesn’t buy it!”

“Aha,” Alan said, nodding slowly. As a father who had already raised two children, he was trying to remember if such interpersonal insight was typical at this young age. “Ladybug is this a boy you go to school with?”

“No, I don’t know where he is, he hasn’t talked to me in a long time,” she said mysteriously, already shuffling through to her next drawing. “Now look at this one, I drew this one today too,” and she showed her dad and brother a drawing of a bus that appeared to be stuck on a too-narrow bridge.

Alan and Carol were more than happy to cater to Lydia’s creative leanings. She started piano lessons at age six, which she took to with alacrity, and when like a bolt from the blue she decided she just _had_ to learn to speak French, they even hired a tutor for her. The tutor, a graduate student at NYU, privately told the Montroses that she was thrilled by how quickly Lydia was picking up the language.

“She’s had another teacher before me, right?” the girl asked Carol.

“Well no, you’re it,” Carol said, with a practiced laugh. She braced herself, as she had learned to do in the past few years, to discover some new quirk or oddity about her daughter.

“Oh,” the tutor said, frowning. “It’s just that she already knew a few phrases – how to ask for a hotel room, how to order tea. I just assumed she’d learned them from another teacher. Do you have friends or family that speak French with her?”

“No, no,” Carol said again, forcing herself to keep smiling. “That’s just our little Ladybug. We don’t know where she gets some things. Mind like a steel trap, that girl.”

That was a phrase Carol had learned to trot out all the time, _mind like a steel trap_ , when speaking of her little Ladybug. How else could you explain those times when Lydia knew things she shouldn’t have, except to say that she must have picked it up from someone else and filed it away in her amazing brain? Seriously, how else? Carol and Alan wondered that constantly.

“It’s just the craziest thing though,” Lydia’s second grade teacher said, shaking her head, during a parent-teacher conference. Carol’s heart sank in her chest at what was fast becoming her least favorite part of the meeting: the comments about how downright _strange_ her little girl was. “I went through the entire lesson and the children began their worksheets – and Lydia finished first, but she’d done all the math problems using a method that hasn’t been taught in schools in… well, since _I_ was in school. It’s not how we do things in elementary math anymore.”

Alan reached over and took Carol’s hand, resting it in her lap, and she was grateful for the silent support. “Were the answers correct?” Alan asked.

“I – yes, they were,” the teacher said hesitantly. “That’s not the point. Lydia’s one of my top students, grades have never been a problem. But it’s difficult to keep her interested and engaged in class. She keeps complaining that she’s already learned everything...?”

So yet again, Carol and Alan were tasked with keeping their bright, cheery, easily bored daughter focused and happy, to give her a classic childhood despite all her strange quirks. She collected stamps for a brief time, which she carefully saved in a green hardcover stock book, and the Montroses signed her up for the school soccer team (though Lydia, an artistic temperament for sure, never quite took to playing sports – she was far more interested in just watching them). It was Carol who had the brainstorm that shifted things forward in a way none of them could have foreseen.

On their way home from grocery shopping one wintry afternoon, Carol drove while Lydia looked out the car window contemplating the snow outside. She’d been quiet a long time – which usually wasn’t a good sign with her – so her mother prompted, “What’s on your mind, Ladybug?”

Lydia shrugged. “Just thinkin’,” she said.

“Thinking about what?”

“Thinkin’ about… how I haven’t seen this much snow since Switzerland,” Lydia said.

Carol’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. Lydia had never been to Switzerland – in fact she’d never been to Europe at all. “Lydia, sweetie,” she said slowly, “why do you say that?”

Lydia heaved a sigh and looked down at her lap. “Mommy,” she said, suddenly quiet. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Of _course_ , Ladybug,” Carol said in a rush, her heart quickening. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

Carol pulled up at a red light and looked at her daughter in the front seat – her beautiful little girl. Lydia favored her father somewhat, with her shiny auburn hair that always hung straight down her back, and her warm brown eyes that sometimes seemed to see further than any eight-year-old should. “Mommy,” Lydia said, very serious, “sometimes… sometimes it feels like there’s a curtain in the back of my head. And on the other side of the curtain, there’s really weird things happening. And the curtain keeps them back, most of the time, but sometimes? It doesn’t.”

Scientist Carol, analytical and literal and mathematically-inclined Carol, struggled to understand if she was being told a metaphor or a poem or something else. “A curtain?” she repeated. “What… uh, what kind of curtain?”

“A thick black one,” Lydia said. Her lower lip quivered slightly, and she clasped her small hands together. “A curtain that’s supposed to be a wall. It should be a wall, so that nothing can get out, but it’s a curtain instead. And I try to keep it closed, I try really really hard! But sometimes there’s a big wind and it blows the curtain open and stuff comes flying out.”

Carol, who just moments earlier had been excited to finally gain some insight into her odd child, now felt like she was out at sea. “A big wind, coming from where?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Lydia said. “It blows backwards. And rain makes applesauce, just like in the book.”

“What book?” Carol asked.

“A book I read to the baby,” Lydia said, tears welling in her eyes. “The book the Skeptical Man gave me, and I read it out loud but I wasn’t any good at it because the baby started crying.”

“What baby?” Carol said, desperate.

“I don’t know,” Lydia moaned. “There’s a baby behind the curtain, and the Skeptical Man is there too but like a real-life person – but then everybody’s screaming and it’s dark and _scary_ and—”

“Lydia.” Carol reached over and clasped her arm. “You’re okay. You’re safe in the car with me and nobody’s screaming. Okay?”

“But when the curtain moves open,” Lydia insisted, “stuff come out from behind it, and I never know what it’s going to be!”

“Like what?” Carol started driving again with the green light, struggling to stay present for her. “What comes out from behind the curtain? What else have you seen?”

“All kinds of stuff,” Lydia said, her voice picking up steam, “like a funny hat, and a kitty cat that’s named something really weird, like – like _Pyramid_ I think – and a giant eye that stares at me when I’m swimming, and – and I don’t know Mommy, all _kinds_ of stuff.”

“But some of it’s scary?”

“Yeah. Like the screaming. It gets all dark and there’s a lot of screaming, and hands trying to grab me.”

Carol had been about to make the turn from the main road into their neighborhood, but at the last moment she kept going straight. Lydia noticed immediately – _mind like a steel trap_ – and turned to her. “Mommy you missed our street!”

“I’ve had an idea,” she announced. “Stick with me, Ladybug. I might have a way to help you with – you know, with your curtain.”

Lydia was bouncing in her seat by the time Carol had turned into the parking lot of a Rite Aid, and dancing on her toes as she followed her mom down the stationery aisle. “Here,” Carol said, gesturing to the shelves. “The first step is to pick out a notebook.”

With much consideration and care, Lydia looked at every single notebook for sale, picking them up and flipping their blank pages and setting them down again, until she settled on a plain unadorned one. It had spiral binding and, bizarrely, was made for left-handed writers – even though Lydia wasn’t left-handed. “This one looks like an old notebook I used to use a long time ago,” she explained.

Another little girl down the aisle was excitedly showing her own mother a Lisa Frank notebook with garish rainbow unicorns on it, and Carol felt a moment of panic. “This is a notebook you saw… behind the curtain?” she ventured.

At Lydia’s decisive nod, Carol figured that was perfect. She led her daughter to the register to pay for it, and once they were back in the car, she told her, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to use this notebook to write down everything that you see behind the curtain.”

“Everything?” Lydia asked, doubtful. “Even the really scary stuff?”

“Even the scary stuff. I sometimes find that when I write things out, they make a lot more sense to me. I can see something that I didn’t see there before.” Carol started up the car again and headed home. “Write down everything as it comes to you, and maybe we can start figuring out what that curtain is.”

The moment they returned home, Lydia did exactly as her mother had suggested: she flipped the notebook around, to use it as a righty, and occupied herself filling page after page with the images she saw. She scribbled away for hours on end, sometimes adding little drawings in the margins to illustrate certain points she couldn’t explain just with words, sometimes crossing out multiple words until she got precisely the right one. While Lydia was certainly a bright girl (her parents already knew that) the writing style and vocabulary she used in her notebook was startlingly advanced for her age – and the words all spelled correctly, too.

At first, Lydia showed the notebook to her mother all the time, and Carol was subjected to a steady supply of stream-of-conscious blurbs that utterly mystified her:

> _I woke up in a strange room and for a moment I didn’t know where on earth I was. If you don’t know where you are, are you really there at all?_
> 
> _The main curtain was thick gold fabric, and stank like it’d been imbued with years of cigarette smoke and oily stage makeup and sweat. You could smell it from down the hall, across the theatre, and up close it was absolutely naff. It got worse with the TV lights blasting on it._
> 
> _He bought me a present with his first thousand quid. I was speechless (yes me,_ sans mots _)._

Carol showed the notebook to Alan one night, and he was equally bewildered. “Well… I suppose she’s got a highly active imagination,” he ventured. “I mean just look at these drawings, honey, and her descriptions. She can really paint a picture. She’s a born artist.”

“So the whole thing with there being curtain at the back of her head… maybe that’s just how she perceives her own creativity?” Carol said with a frown.

He shrugged. “Sure?” He chuckled then, rubbing a hand up and down his wife’s arm. “Feeling a little out of your depth?”

“I suppose,” she said, smiling hesitantly back. “We’re such a… you know, a math and science-y bunch. With Scott wanting to go into medicine and Travis interested in engineering, Lydia being an artist is just a little out of left field.”

“Different but nice,” Alan said, putting an arm around her. “She’s going to do incredible things when she grows up.” And of course Carol couldn’t disagree with that.

The notebook from Rite Aid was the first time Lydia truly started to own the things she saw – the images and thoughts that filtered out to her from the back of her mind. But now that she was writing things out the images came faster, one triggering another and another and another. She would stay up late at night, lying in bed with the notebook propped against her raised knees, writing away about every glimpse she caught of the vivid world beyond the curtain. The explanation that it was just her imagination worked at first, right up until it didn’t. She started to see grownup things she had no other reference for, like smoking funny little cigarettes, and snorting white powder that burned her brain, and tossing back a lot of drinks that made her feel fuzzy just thinking about them. These flashes usually came paired with vague hallucinations – of flower-breathing dragons and Calder people made of wires – that Lydia didn’t like to linger over too much, though she still dutifully drew them into her notebook.

Most images came to her completely divorced from any context, only holding a single thought or feeling. She saw scuffed-up herringbone parquet flooring that seemed to encompass everything sane in the world, and a pale pink floral pattern on a tea cup that made her feel intensely homesick (“the good china, for the Queen” Lydia wrote next to a sketch of the design). She claimed an orange recliner as her throne and knew that there was always a brown glass ashtray within reach when she sat in it. She remembered cold gray pavement wet with snow, and soft brown dirt warmed by a tamarind sun, and a long, deep kiss on the mouth that seemed to set her very soul afire.

(That last part always made Lydia blush in the light of day. She’d kissed just one boy, Bobby Farnsworth, behind the slide at the school playground, and she definitely hadn’t felt any kind of fire then.)

The more she wrote in her notebook, the less she shared with her mother. It dawned on Lydia, the last time she showed it to Carol, that her mom was actually quite confounded by what Lydia wrote, and would get a little line between her eyebrows as she frowned down at whatever was on the page. She knew her mom was a woman of math and science, and there was absolutely no math or science to any of this. Lydia, though only eight years old, knew that much. So she stopped sharing the notebook with anyone, even as she filled ever more pages with words and sketches:

> _I’m at the bottom of a vast, wide-open valley – dark everywhere but for the glittering lights, the flashes like sparks that flicker and dance around me. And the valley echoes with screaming, an ecstasy that borders on a religious experience, but I’m the crippled fool they worship. The world turned upside down, and somehow I’ve got myself at the center of it all._

She drew the Skeptical Man in her notebook too, in more ways than ever: seated at a piano, holding a lamb, building a sand castle, lying in bed. His face remained obscure save for that single high-arching eyebrow, but no matter what she did she couldn’t see the rest of him. Nevertheless, drawing him made him feel nearby, somehow, and when Lydia got riled up about something – a bad grade on a test, that snob Tiffany saying something mean about her again – she would turn to her sketches of the Skeptical Man and feel soothed.

The images stayed in her head, or in the confines of her left-handed notebook. For a while, that was fine – they were controlled, contained, and Lydia thought she could exist with that. She could live one life during the day with her friends, going to elementary school and arguing with her big brothers and begging her parents to be allowed to wear makeup like Melissa’s parents let _her_ ; and then at night there was a different world, a world that was harvest gold and avocado green, wool and tweed and velvet and corduroy, profound loneliness and overpowering joy. Her imagination… maybe.

And then, late in September, there was Lisa Harrington’s sleepover birthday party.

The girls in Mrs. Carter’s third grade class had talked about little else for weeks. There were elaborate plans made about what music they’d listen to, how much pizza they’d eat, what videos they could watch on the Harringtons’ VCR. By the time the night of the party had actually arrived, their excitement couldn’t be contained. Alan had barely pulled into the Harringtons’ driveway before Lydia had bounded out, grabbing her My Little Pony sleeping bag and suitcase and shouting a farewell over her shoulder at her bemused dad.

“Guys, Lydia’s here!” Lisa yelled, as she welcomed her in. Lydia was promptly shown where to put her gift with the others in a large pile on the table, then the girls squealed in excitement as she revealed that she’d brought _The Princess Bride_ and _Footloose_ for their movie marathon.

The pizzas arrived ten minutes later, so all the girls piled into the dining room to eat. After that was the birthday cake, with flowers in purple and pink frosting covering the top. Hopped up on sugar, the girls all got into their pajamas and staked out their territory in the den, where Mrs. Harrington was laying out everything they needed to paint their nails.

“Now don’t forget to lay out towels underneath you while you work,” she warned. “I don’t want you getting any nail polish on the carpet.”

“Thanks Mrs. Harrington!” the girls chirped, as they dug through the different colors. Mrs. Harrington left them to their nail painting, saying she’d be in the kitchen if they needed her.

Lisa’s older sister Angela had an enviably large record _and_ CD collection, and she’d allowed Lisa to pick out five albums she could listen to – only because their parents had pressed the issue, of course. The Harringtons had been the first people on their block to get a CD player and Lydia was fascinated watching the silver CD slide in on its tray. Imagine not having to mess around with a record player needle anymore to find a song in the middle of an album side! Lydia contentedly settled in to paint Becky’s nails neon green while the New Kids on the Block CD played on the speakers. For the first time in months, the world behind the curtain stayed where it was, dark and quiet, and she could exist in the present moment without any distractions. Lydia couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so happy.

At one point a heated debate broke out about what videos they’d watch and in _exactly_ what order, but Lisa got the final say as the birthday girl. “Obviously _Princess Bride_ first,” she declared, which made Lydia grin, “then _Dirty Dancing_ —”

“My mom won’t let me watch that one,” Jenny said, forlorn. “She said I’m not old enough.”

“Well duh, we’re not going to tell your mom you watched it,” Lydia said, matter-of-fact. The other girls’ eyes lit up at her boldness. Now the party felt like a full-on rebellion, and they all looked towards the door as though expecting Mrs. Harrington to be standing there, a witness to their rule breaking.

Becky’s nail polish dried, and while it did Lydia dug through the pile of little bottles. “I want a really bright color,” she declared. “Something that stands out.”

“Ooh, I can use a toothpick and add polka dots if you want,” Becky suggested, and after a few minutes’ serious discussion they decided on a red background with light blue dots. Lydia settled her right hand down on the folded towel as Becky began to layer on the deep red polish.

The New Kids on the Block album reached its final song, and Lisa jumped up to press several buttons to turn off the CD player and switch back to the turntable. “So look,” she said, as she put it back into its jewel case. “This next band is from like way back in olden times but just give them a chance, okay?”

“As long as it’s not Perry Como,” Stephanie said. “My grandma _loves_ him but he’s like, so boring.”

“Oh my gosh, no, it’s not Perry Como, he’s so lame,” Lisa said, rolling her eyes. While the other girls laughed and joked about their own grandparents’ horrible taste in music, Lisa picked up a cardboard record sleeve. Lydia caught a glimpse of four blue-tinted faces on a flat black background.

Out of nowhere a cold blast hit her square in the chest. A cold blast like from an industrial AC unit, cranked up way too high. _The hotel carpet was some ghastly geometric pattern, the only thing he could see with any clarity aside from the others. “Just a bit closer together, lads – there we are, now hold that position…”_

“Wait, what’s this old band called again?” Becky asked, peering at the sleeve. Lisa held it up for all of them to see and announced the name to the room, but to Lydia her voice sounded like it was a hundred miles away, or coming from the bottom of a cavern, echoing so badly the exact words were obliterated.

What was happening? What was this? Her heart started beating faster.

Lisa leaned over and moved the needle onto the spinning record with an audible bump _._ The other girls continued to chat and admire their nail-painting handiwork.

As soon as the first song twanged over the speakers, Lydia was utterly lost.

The curtain blew back, tearing wide open in a way it had never done before, and out poured an endless stream of sounds, images, shapes, people, places, feelings, songs, voices, touches, smells like she was reliving memories, the things behind the curtain were _memories_ , of course!! memories, what else could they be – but Lydia couldn’t keep up with the deluge. It all came spewing out, disjointed and akimbo and shaking the very ground beneath her feet. Her head ached, straining at the seams as floods of memories poured in, and in, and—

_The spray of the untamed ocean on his face made him feel alive in a way he—_

_The bus rounded a corner, making their bodies sway together until they were pressed leg to—_

_No no, add the seventh there. Sounds better, yeah? Then we go to the next—_

_Do you know who you are?_

“ _—_ she’s getting married next summer and she said I could be the flower girl,” Becky was saying, still fully immersed in painting Lydia’s nails. She’d finished up the right hand and was now on the left. “She told me I can pick out my own dress too, as long as the color _—_ ”

Sharp fragments, like a broken mirror, jagged and rough at the edges. Nothing connected, everything disjointed, feelings and impressions and snippets of conversation. Just enough to whet her appetite but not enough to tell what it all really meant. Song after song Lydia felt battered by sight and sound, the smiles and the laughs and the inside jokes – she felt starched white shirts and hotel couches and airplane seats, smelled the sweat of a half-hour set, felt the ringing in her ears of a hundred screaming girls, a thousand, a million _–_

And just when she felt like she couldn’t take any more, the last song on the A-side burst into her consciousness: _Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you—_

Lydia cried out and scrambled to her feet, heedless of Becky and the wet nail polish, and grabbed her shoulder in a vice-like grip. Pulled, like she could pull away the burning. Like the world’s worst sunburn. Like her left arm was being wrenched clear out of its socket by an invisible—

She looked down. Red, bright like blood, smeared all over her She-Ra pajamas. Her breath came in a gasp and caught, stuck in a throat hoarse after a long recording session.

_—and then while I’m away—_

Becky gaped up at her. “Lydia?” The other girls had turned to stare, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

“Mother, I’m shot,” Lydia rasped out.

Everything went black.

_I’ll pretend that I’m—_

She remembered the cold grey pavement wet with snow but now it stretched a little further out, like a single spotlight widening out to full house lights – right, she was in the City, her city, his home where he could be left unbothered and nobody cared who he was. He fell and the road rose up to meet him, hard and unforgiving, slushy with the recent snow, and she saw red but that was just the big Christmas bow someone had hung at the doorman’s station – no, it was blood, his own, seeping out of his wool coat _—_

A woman shrieked but it was somewhere else. A universe away. There was talking, so much talking and nothing was being said, because they didn’t know _how_ – what good were the words if you didn’t know how to use them? He opened his mouth and nothing came out, nothing, just like when his friend died so long ago and he’d lost his voice for grieving. They moved him, picked him up and _fuck a bloody pig, that fucking hurts, man!_ but he still couldn’t find the words to tell them that _—_

_—hope that my dreams will come true—_

“Do you know who you are?” an unfamiliar American voice asked from above. He wanted to say, like a jackass, _No I don’t, mister, can you tell me please?_ because it was a question he’d heard many times before. Yes, she knew who she was – he’d always been the same person, it was the rest of the world that had hurried up and got different. Except the words just weren’t there. He reached for them but they fell away, melting into the snow, indifferent letters scattering across the ground, falling into the pit of fire that hovered where his shoulder had been.

The darkness and the cold abruptly receded and all was white, hot, bright lights shining above him, but it was as though they were on a television screen piercing through a shadowed room. Cold stethoscopes and dry chapped hands, clipped voices speaking in some unfamiliar shorthand. The world slid by on holy rollers, and behind it all was the canned sound of muzak – Jesus, anything but that, he hated that fake elevator shite – he turned the dial on the radio in the front parlor and now he could hear the real version of the song, and it was _him_. His voice, warm and low, singing right in his ear as if he were in the room. The pain in his shoulder (Christ the agony, had anything ever hurt this much before?) didn’t matter anymore, as long as he could hear that voice, that blue velvet voice that had once melded so seamlessly into his own. He wasn’t alone, never.

 _—my loving, all_ …

The light whittled down to a pinpoint, with that voice he loved limning the whole world.

_—darling I’ll be true…_

Is that you, love? Are you really here with me?

Oh love, my _—_!

Like waking from a long sleep he came to, hooked up to a machine that beeped and hummed with comforting regularity. The hospital room sat silent and dark, so he reckoned it must have been one of those small hours of the night, and he was meant to be resting. Had the doctors fixed him up already? He wondered what the scars from the bullets looked like.

At his right sat a rough shadow of a person, a drowsy woman, clinging to his hand. “Mother?” he whispered, and at the sound of her voice the world

_slipped—_

She spasmed in her bed as it snapped back into place.

“Lydia, sweetheart?” the woman said, her voice high and thin. She sat on the edge of her chair, reached forward and brushed the hair back from the child’s sweaty forehead.

For a terrifying moment, Lydia didn’t recognize her face. “…Mommy?”

“Oh Lydia.” Tears poured down her face, as her mom smiled at her. “Ladybug what happened? We were all so worried about you. Mr. Harrington called me and said you were… they sounded so scared.”

“The song did it to me.” Lydia scrunched up her nose, feeling snot dried above her lip. “I went into a dream, but it was real.”

Her mother frowned. “What, Ladybug? I don’t understand.”

“I was there but it wasn’t me, it was someone else.”

Carol patted Lydia’s hand, lying on the covers. “You get your rest, okay? The doctors will talk to you in the morning. Just rest now.”

The words. She had so many of them, but couldn’t fit them all together, not in a way that would make them understand. Lydia tried to explain it all, first to the doctors at the hospital, then to the ones that her parents took her to in private offices that had soft couches she could lie on. She went around and around in circles, trying to lay it all out in a way that made sense, but she could tell by the looks on the grownups’ faces that she wasn’t getting through to them. They couldn’t see, not really.

One word came back to her in response, a hard word with razors in its claws: _schizophrenia_. Her parents had looked startled and insisted no, their beautiful little girl wasn’t like that. She’d just had an episode of some kind, a seizure, a spell. Maybe it was epilepsy. Maybe it was a brain tumor. Their daughter was eccentric but she wasn’t like _that_.

“She presents all the classic symptoms,” the doctor had told her parents, “one of the big ones being that she claims there are thoughts in her head that belong to someone else.”

“That’s not what I said,” Lydia insisted, sitting upright. “You don’t get it. They don’t belong to someone else, they belong to me, they’re all my memories.”

“Lydia,” the doctor said, smiling patiently, “you told me that you remember sailing a boat in the ocean during a storm.”

“Yeah, I do! I was at the wheel all by myself, it was really scary!”

“But you never did that, Lydia. Don’t you see? That never actually happened."

She argued, or tried to. She shouted. She stomped her foot and insisted; she wept, great rivers of tears that utterly failed to convince them of anything. There were more doctors, second opinions, third opinions, and they all came back with the same frightening diagnosis. She saw her parents lose hope over time, hope that it was all some big misunderstanding, and come to accept their new reality.

And ultimately, acceptance was easier. These grownups couldn’t _all_ be wrong, could they? So the Montroses stopped looking for an elusive fifth opinion and settled on a doctor for Lydia, a highly recommended psychiatrist she would now see on a regular basis, who would prescribe her pills and fix her brain so she could live a nice and ordinary life again. This was their new normal, and one day Lydia was going to be normal too.

The pills were colorful, terrible little things. Almost as soon as she started taking them Lydia could feel the curtain walled off, as though hidden behind heavy dark bricks, until there was nothing but a wide black blank in the back of her head. She put away her left-handed notebook and didn’t look at it anymore. None of it had been real, after all, and Lydia’s shrink had told her she now had to focus on what was real, not on things she had apparently made up inside her mixed-up head.

By the time she turned nine in December, Lydia was much calmer and steadier than she’d ever been before. The girls who came to her birthday party at the Montroses’ house were wary and on edge, as though waiting for her to snap the way she had at Lisa Harrington’s sleepover party, and they jumped at every unexpected sound. All of the parents stayed rather than dropping off their kids, just in case, but the expected freak out never came. Lydia was tepid, dull, smiled politely at jokes and thanked them all for their thoughtful gifts.

Two weeks later, when the calendar ticked over from 1989 to 1990 and everyone celebrated the brand-new decade, only then was there a small crack where the light could get through. The curtain wavered limply, still hanging there behind the wall in her mind. And she heard a voice – _his_ voice again, the Skeptical Man – singing “Auld Lang Syne” in harmony with her, then chattering on about what the next decade would bring the two of them.

Not the next decade, not the Nineties, but a decade already past.

And he wasn’t the only one there – two others, out of focus, yet somehow just as known to her:

_Where are we going, fellas?_

_To the top!_

_And where is that, fellas?_

_To the toppermost of the poppermost!_

But Lydia knew better now. The toppermost of the poppermost wasn’t real. It was only in her head.

Without the distraction of weird thoughts and memories that weren’t her own (and without the benefit of tapping into lessons from years past) Lydia’s school grades took a brief tumble. The doctors told her parents she was adjusting to the new medication, a statement that proved true a month or two later. Lydia, now calmer, quieter, more focused, remained one of the brightest minds in her class and that was what really mattered to her parents – that her new diagnosis, unknown to everyone save the school nurse and her homeroom teacher, wouldn’t hold her back in any way, and the bright future the Montroses had envisioned for their little girl was still within reach.

When she entered high school in 1995, her art teacher noticed her sketches and encouraged her to submit her work to the school newspaper. After publishing a few political cartoons that were a hit, Lydia soon found herself writing articles too. She started pouring all of her extracurricular energy into researching and writing news stories – she even became the first freshman in her school’s history to have a page-one story above the fold (on President Clinton’s speech urging peace in Ireland between the Catholics and Protestants). The following year she covered the 1996 presidential election with great aplomb, writing out in detail Dole and Clinton’s respective platforms, as well as noting key Senate races. A local news station interviewed her in the lead up to Election Day ‘96, seemingly amused by this young girl – not yet old enough to vote – who could rattle off a list of what the president should do in the first one hundred days of his term.

Her writing guided her to politics, to feminism, to foreign relations and diplomacy and all kinds of current events beyond the boundaries of her hometown. She participated in various clubs at school, and joined field trips to New York to hear important speakers on various subjects. She even managed to finagle several sit-downs with major figures by playing the Precocious Kid Reporter card to her advantage: Lydia’s interview with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan won her a national student journalism award and invitations from several of the best journalism schools in the country.

Alan and Carol were bursting with pride for her and all of her accomplishments. Scott and Travis, like dutiful big brothers, ragged her about being a smarty pants and a goody two-shoes, but they were proud of her too. All that mess back in her childhood, the schizophrenia, the hallucinations, that frightening episode at Lisa Harrington’s long-ago birthday party, it all seemed a hundred years in the past, and thankfully had had no lasting impact on her prospects for the future. Most of the people in their social circle completely forgot about the peculiar Montrose girl, and only remembered Lydia the Rising Star.

To the student body and the Class of 1999, though, she was Lydia Montrose, Bitch Girl Wonder of the Tri-State Area, who never hesitated to jump first and ask questions later. She drank at parties, despite the strong medications she was on, and tried cigarettes once but decided she hated the way they smelled. She was the first in her group of friends to make out with a boy, the first to go even further than that (which earned her some crude nicknames from more conservative corners), and, when a boy actually dared called her a _chicken-head bimbo_ to her face, she didn’t hesitate to punch him so hard he was knocked out cold. “Call me that again!” she yelled, her face red with anger, as his friends carried his limp carcass away and hers struggled to hold her back. “Fucking _call me that again_ , you asshole!”

Said boy was actually the captain of the football team, and said punch happened two days before the Homecoming game, but when the principal brought this up Lydia just rolled her eyes and drawled, “We’re playing Scarsdale, they were gonna win anyway.” She then launched into an impassioned speech about slut shaming and how girls were unfairly held to a different standard that negatively impacted their educational achievement – a speech that only stopped when the principal wearily agreed not to give her a detention, just a warning.

The beers snuck at parties, getting to third base with a cute boy from her calculus class, becoming an outspoken feminist who annoyed all her sexist male teachers – in this way alone could she vent her frustrations. Because even though she dutifully took her meds, reported regularly to her shrink, and was open on most other topics with her supportive and loving parents (and her brothers, when they weren’t being jerks), within a few years it became obvious to her that the wall in her brain wasn’t impermeable, and the curtain at the back of her head was one hundred percent still there.

She told not a soul, not even her best friends: about how the curtain sometimes peeled open, but only in her dreams, and only on rare occasions. The Skeptical Man was there, along with three others who came a bit later – Sunny Guy and Kid Brother, and a dark female figure she just referred to as the Goddess. She’d been sensing them for so long that she knew their presence immediately, the sounds of their voices, the colors of their auras. When she was in the City, walking down a crowded sidewalk, she would often find herself scanning the faces of everyone she passed, thinking _Is that you? Are you even real?_

In this way her senior year began. On a whim one afternoon in October, Lydia pulled out her old left-handed notebook and glanced through it, looking for something specific and tangible that she could latch onto. At some point in her childhood she’d thought that these writings were actual memories, and yet her shrink had drilled it into her for the past several years that they were mere schizophrenic hallucinations – but only one of those could possibly be true, right? The reporter in her, the tireless crusader for truth, decided that she had to find out one way or another.

She started small. Lydia took note of every mention she’d written down in her notebook of watching movies, then flirted with the clerks at Blockbuster who fancied themselves Quentin Tarantino in the making (there was always one, every shift) to figure out if she was recalling real things that actually existed.

“I was at my friend’s house, and her older brother was watching this movie,” Lydia said, smiling coyly at a guy whose name tag read _Greg – Favorite Film: Reservoir Dogs_. “It was like, so wild, I don’t know. I think the scene was like… this older guy, wearing a bowler hat, who lived in a dark little apartment stuffed with old newspapers… and his neighbors are a bunch of hippies? Like dancing around in costumes and putting on light shows and listening to Indian music?”

Greg’s eyes bugged out. “Wow,” he said. “I think your friend’s brother was watching this film called _Wonderwall._ ”

Her heart lurched in her chest. “Just like the Oasis song!” Lydia said brightly, hiding her distress. “There’s a movie too? I didn’t know that.”

“It doesn’t go with the song, the song was named for the film but they’re totally separate,” Greg lectured her, leaning against the counter and flicking his hair back. He wasn’t nearly as smooth as he thought he was. “It was this arthouse indie film that came out back in the Sixties. George Harrison wrote the music for it, you know.”

For some reason, the word _hazza_ instantly popped into her head, but she didn’t know what that meant. “Oh awesome,” Lydia said, twirling a lock of her hair around her finger. “So do you have a copy of that here? I kinda wanted to watch it, see what it was about.”

“No. Honestly, I’m surprised your friend’s brother could find it,” Greg told her. “It’s never actually been officially released, there’s just a few bootleg tapes out there on the black market. Not great quality, got to be pretty bad transfers after all these years. Probably barely watchable by now.”

“Guess I need to ask him who his black market contact is,” she said with a chuckle. She discreetly wiped at the sweat beading at her hairline. How on earth could she remember seeing a film that had never been released on home video – unless maybe she’d seen it in theaters…? “Okay, here’s another one – a movie, uh, my grandpa was watching the other day. There’s a guy…” _You know him. You met him. You got drunk once with him in France._ “Um, that actor from _Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,_ I can’t think of his—”

“Steve Martin? Michael Caine?”

“Michael Caine,” she confirmed, “but like much younger, you know? In his twenties or something. And he’s like this sleazy womanizer who talks directly to camera—”

“ _Alfie_ ,” Greg said instantly, eager to please. “We have that over here in the Classics section, I can show you if you want.”

Helpful Greg, the Tarantino wannabe. Lydia sat at the end of her bed that afternoon, watching _Alfie_ on the little TV in her room as her heart sank lower and lower. She’d absolutely seen this movie before. She recognized the costumes, actors, sets, the patter and rhythm of some of the scenes. She even knew some of the lines before they were spoken. Lydia fast-forwarded to the end credits and saw that the character Annie had been played by an actress named Jane Asher, and the name was so intensely familiar to her that Lydia shuddered like someone had walked over her grave. She shut the TV off and had to breathe deeply for several minutes to regain her equilibrium.

After going to her dad’s old Merriam-Webster dictionary and finding that _hazza_ wasn’t in it, she unconsciously started using the strange word as a descriptor – every time she rediscovered something new in her old notebook, or made a connection with something she’d seen in her head to something that was real, she’d mutter it under her breath. “Hazza,” she whispered, when she discovered that a tune she’d woken up whistling one morning had come from the Sixties too.

“No, it’s ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man,’ I just said that,” Scott repeated, sounding annoyed on his end of the phone. He was probably regretting giving her the number to his apartment in Boston. “Why are you suddenly interested in Donovan anyway? I thought you were listening to Madonna and Alanis Morissette and all that girl power crap.”

“Ouch. Do you want me to tell Mom you’re anti-female empowerment, or should I? I’ll break it to her gently, I promise.”

Scott huffed a laugh. “Mea culpa, Gloria Steinem,” he said. “Look, I just had an eighteen-hour shift at the hospital so I gotta go get some sleep, but if you’re having this sudden urgent need to listen to Donovan, I’ve got some of his records in my room. On the shelf under my player. Don’t touch anything else.”

“Like I’d want to get anywhere near your porn stash,” Lydia said.

“Wait, did Mom find my _Playboys_ \--?!”

“Thanks Scott, you’re my favorite brother!” She hung up on his frantic voice.

And there was the answer to another of her questions, as she stared at the albums she’d pulled off of Scott’s shelf. A thoughtful oval face nestled under dark brown curls stared up at her from the cover of _A Gift From a Flower to a Garden_ , and it was a face she had, without a doubt, seen before. She saw Donovan backlit, as though the sun were burning directly behind him, with a light stubble shadowing his jaw. He leaned in and touched her hand to move it slightly – _why?...to show me something. Show me what?_

She was still puzzling over how a trippy folk singer had gotten behind her curtain days later, while the rest of her class settled into their seats for eighth period calculus, when her boyfriend Kevin suddenly chuckled and pointed at her. “You look like you’re playing a guitar,” he said, and with a start Lydia looked down and realized that was exactly what she was doing. Her right hand rested in her lap, palm down with her thumb sticking straight out, while her left fidgeted over her class notebook.

Later that night, when they were at his house, Kevin gestured to the acoustic guitar he had gathering dust in the corner of his bedroom (they’d been dating for two months, and she’d never once seen him pick it up). “Do you play?”

“My brother Travis did for a while,” Lydia admitted, as Kevin picked the guitar up and offered it to her. “Went through a Kurt Cobain phase, like every other guy in our school.”

The guitar slid into her arms and into position on pure muscle memory, so effortlessly that Lydia saw goosebumps rise on her skin. One quick strum; the strings were badly out of tune. She looked up at Kevin, stuck. He grabbed the guitar from her and tuned it, or got close enough, and Lydia took it once again, her heart rising into her throat. Could she really…? If she held the guitar long enough, was it possible something – a song – would come to her?

She ran her hand along the frets, slowly sliding up and down. Her fingers twitched, seemingly of their own volition – a fumbling sequence of notes. Kevin sat up straight. “Wait I know that one,” he said. He snapped his fingers. “‘Rock Lobster’! Oh man, I love the B-52s!”

“Yeah, me too,” Lydia mumbled, handing the guitar back to hide how badly she was shaking. _Hazza_ , she thought, as she changed the subject to something else, _hazza again and again._

That night she made a decision, after returning home from Kevin’s house. She went up to the upstairs bathroom and held her orange prescription bottles in her hands – the medications she’d been on ever since her “traumatic episode similar to a PTSD flashback” at Lisa Harrington’s birthday. There hadn’t been another freak out since then, but the memories were still coming – so the meds must not have been doing anything.

She was taking them for no reason. So she stopped. They ended up flushed down the toilet, or in the garbage can at school, from that point on.

Over the next few weeks Lydia smiled and told her shrink she was feeling good, that her mood was stable and there were no more thoughts in her head coming from someone else, all while the strong antipsychotic drugs slowly leeched out of her system. She felt her head get clearer, food tasted better, and her heart felt lighter. Now when the curtain rippled open – tentatively, delicately – she stood her ground and embraced it, examined the new memory and wrote it down again in her left-handed notebook. With her reporting skills honed from writing for the school paper the past several years, she launched into interrogating and researching everything she saw:

> _I’m completely covered, head to toe, in pink paint. – clothes look like army fatigues underneath, but not real ones – am I acting in a movie? One guy looks kind of like the actor who played the Phantom on Broadway – I should still have the program from when Mom and Dad took me to see it – Michael Crawford – check his filmography at the library, was he ever in an artsy war film???_
> 
> _A blocky grey concrete museum, and the exhibit is objects all filled with water. Where is this museum? There’s a building that looks like the Addams Family’s house – similar to Syracuse University’s main building? What are the museums in Syracuse – Everson Museum of Art, 401 Harrison Street – the number 31 keeps running through my head – 31, 31, 31 – numbers on a cake – someone’s birthday?_

She couldn’t dedicate as much time as she’d like to her investigation – it was coming on spring, and her high school days were drawing to an end. There were finals to study for, a prom dress to pick out, the whole wide future to plan. Lydia had been accepted to Columbia University, where she’d start on a History and Public Policy dual major in the fall; Kevin was going to Rutgers in New Jersey, which was only about forty miles away, so they could visit each other every weekend and do the long-distance thing (Lydia thought that was very optimistic of him, since she was planning to break up with him after prom).

She might have been lukewarm about the boy who would be her escort, but she _loved_ her prom dress. She and her mother had had a girls’ day out, where they had brunch at their favorite café then went to several boutiques to look over their offerings. It was a wonderful afternoon, just her and her mom, being girly and doing girl stuff together, with none of the boys around to complain about them taking too long to shop. At the third store they found it: a simple plum-colored dress embroidered in an all-over floral pattern, with spaghetti straps, fitted bodice, and a full-length skirt. It was love at first sight.

Carol’s eyes filled with tears the moment Lydia stepped out of the dressing room. As she stood in front of the mirrors in the dress, checking every possible angle, her mom dug around in her purse to find a tissue to dab at her eyes. “My little Ladybug,” she said, when Lydia turned to her for approval, “all grown up. You look so beautiful, sweetie.”

“Mom,” Lydia complained, “stop it, you’re gonna make me cry too.”

Carol chuckled and reached out to her, so they were clasping hands. “I’ve been meaning to find a moment to tell you this,” she said, looking up at Lydia. “I wanted to make sure you know your father and I are so, _so_ proud of you, Ladybug.”

Lydia felt her face heat with embarrassed pleasure, as her mom went on: “You know I still remember the day you were born – we weren’t expecting you at all since you weren’t due for another three weeks, and your dad and I joked that you were in a hurry to join us. We were at your Aunt Sharon’s apartment in the City, and it was a nightmare getting to the nearest hospital.”

“Got to love New York traffic,” Lydia said with a laugh, wiping at her eyes.

But Carol shook her head. “No, something was happening at Central Park that day – Yoko Ono was hosting a moment of silence that afternoon for John Lennon, who’d just been killed the week before. There were crowds of people everywhere, blocking the roads, so the taxi couldn’t get through.”

_John love, has the kettle boiled yet? I’d murder for a cuppa._

Lydia felt as though she’d been doused in water, or blasted again with a burst of cold air. Somehow, she’d never heard this story before. “Oh,” she said, straining to sound casual, “so you went into labor with me… during a John Lennon memorial?”

“Circle of life, right?” Carol grinned up at her, squeezing her hands. “And when we brought you home that first night, I couldn’t stop staring at you. You were so beautiful, Ladybug. And I was the one who got to be your mom.”

Lydia’s eyes blurred with tears. A veritable storm of emotions swirled inside her at this new information her mom had so innocently passed along. She pulled Carol in for a hug, struggling to master the fear and confusion she suddenly felt. “I love you too, Mimi,” she said absently, hardly aware of what she was saying.

The stage was now set: Lydia and Kevin went to their prom the first weekend in June, when all the lawns in the neighborhood were green and verdant and the coming summer’s heat was just beginning. A bunch of girls got ready together at Lydia’s house and then met up there with their dates, planning to share a limo ride into the City. There were the obligatory photos in front of the Montroses’ house, with their parents lined up snapping picture after picture, the moms crying, the dads being obnoxiously jokey and clearing their throats a lot.

Travis was home from college, languorous and lazy after surviving all his finals, and he sat quietly on the front stoop watching the goings on. Lydia, apropos of nothing, turned to him. “I want a picture of the two of us, Trav,” she insisted.

He frowned, huddled inside his gray Gap hoodie. “Huh? Why?”

“Because you’re my brother and we haven’t had a photo together in a while. Humor me.”

He put up a weak fight, but a few minutes later he was standing next to Lydia on the lawn, shifting awkwardly in his track pants and flip flops. “Mom,” Lydia said, turning to the row of parents, “you and Dad too. Family portrait, I’ve just decided.”

Alan handed his camera to Kevin’s dad and bounded over, giving Lydia a squeeze around the shoulders, and her mom said something about needing to fix her hair but she was headed over too. And as Lydia stood there with most of her family, she had an almost out-of-body experience – a moment where she seemed to step outside herself and look at them as an objective observer.

This was her family. This was her clan, the Montroses of Westchester. How had she gotten so lucky?

The limo whisked all the high school couples away, down to the City for their prom at the Plaza Hotel. The ballroom was lit with hundreds of twinkle lights and pink and purple and blue streamers, while a large banner along the wall proclaimed that they’d arrived at _The Prom at the End of the Millennium: Class of 1999._ Lydia and her friends grabbed each other’s hands and let out excited squees at the sight, and the promise of a night they’d all remember forever.

The food was incredible, served by the hotel’s liveried staff like they were grownups out in the real world. Then, once all the plates had been cleared away, the overhead lights went down and out came the deejay, and then things _really_ got started. As the deejay kicked off the night with “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It,” Lydia realized that, for the first time in ages, she could let go. She could be herself here. The heavy antipsychotic drugs were on their way out of her system, her head was clearer than it had been in years, her dress was beautiful, a cute guy in a tux was dancing with her—

Lydia ended up in the photobooth multiple times over the course of the night, getting her picture taken with everyone she could grab hold of. Some of the more emotional girls got weepy, sad that their high school days were coming to an end and they’d all be scattered to colleges across the country in the fall. Lydia was the one who suddenly had the idea that they’d all sign each other’s arms, like temporary tattoos to commemorate the evening. Her friend Ashley quickly tracked down a hotel server who rustled up two pens for them, and the girls were all soon signing each other’s arms and drawing little hearts and LYLAS!!!. It was so hot in the ballroom that some of the signatures immediately blurred in the heat, but none of them seemed to care.

“All right all right,” the deejay said some hours later, letting a Jordan Knight song fade out, “let’s take a moment right now to thank all the teachers and faculty who made this incredible prom tonight possible. All our school staff that are here, let’s give ‘em a round of applause!”

Lydia turned with everyone else towards the row of teacher chaperons that stood in a line against the side wall and cheered and clapped. Their teachers smiled and waved back, some laughing bashfully. “Let’s take a time machine back to when they were at their own proms,” the deejay continued, setting up the next song, “with a few words from the King himself!” Over the sound system then came the unmistakable sound of Elvis Presley.

_Elvis! Christ, the bloody army’s ruined him!_

Lydia froze at the sound of the voice she knew belonged to Kid Brother. Freak Out 2.0 was coming on fast and she had to get out of there before anyone could witness it. “Hey,” she said to Kevin, “I’ll be right back, restroom break.”

“Okay, I’ll grab us some more punch,” he said. Before the words were even out of his mouth she’d picked up her dress in both hands and made a beeline out of the ballroom.

_I’ve got the lyrics to “That’s All Right” written down, took me ages—_

Lydia consulted with a passing porter in the hallway, who directed her to the closest ladies’ room. She barged in, ignoring the cluster of girls at the sinks fixing their makeup, went to the last stall down at the end of the row and slammed the door behind her.

Deep breaths. In, out. She clenched her hands into fists as she inhaled, then released them as she breathed out. The black and blue signatures her friends had scribbled on both her arms glistened with sweat, but remained enough to anchor her in a women’s bathroom at the Plaza Hotel in New York in June of 1999. She could stay in control this time, she knew she could. Already it felt different than Lisa Harrington’s party – more manageable, a door she was unlocking herself instead of a deluge catching her wrong-footed – it was good different. She pushed the curtain open and

_Something was different this time. The guitars, the drums – they all sounded like a cohesive unit. He turned slightly to see if the others were feeling it too._

_Well boys, I’ve just gotten the word. You’ve hit number one in America!_

_Maybe… maybe I’ll work on this song on my own._

_I’m not going all the way to bloody Nepal just for an album cover. Just take a photo of us walking down the bloody street outside and call it a day for fuck’s sake, Jesus Christ._

Her breaths came hard and fast, hoarse with panic, and sweat dripped down her back. You’re okay, Lydia. You wanted this to happen. It’s exactly what you—

_\--now it’s gonna be a hundred pence to the pound! Can you believe it? What are we, bloody Americans?_

_There was a tight heat in the pit of his stomach as he listened: “Wise men say only fools rush in / But I can’t help falling in love with you…”_

Lydia tilted her chin up, staring at the bathroom’s harsh fluorescent lights until her eyes watered, and pressed her back even harder into the stall door until her foot slipped slightly on the bathroom tile. She saw a little record shop – wait, that was the Eiffel Tower at the end of the street. Had she been to Paris, was _that_ why she’d insisted on learning French all those years ago—?

_He was wearing a white sport coat with a pink flower tucked into the lapel – lad clearly saw himself as the bloody Lothario of Liverpool, wasn’t that a laugh—_

_What if I wanted to use an imaginary hammer on an imaginary nail?_

_Pardon the intrusion, lad. I’m looking for the family of Julia Dykins._

Lydia blinked and held her breath. God. A name a name a name a _name_ —

 _So there’s this fella, J.R., and somebody shot him at the end of the last series but we couldn’t see who it was, and tonight they’re finally gonna show who did it – you’ve really never watched_ Dallas, _Mimi?_

_Tell Tim I said hello, Mimi, buy him lots of fish and scritch him under the chin, you know how he likes it when you do that!_

_You’re going to wear these glasses, now, young man. I won’t have you blindly stumbling about the neighborhood like some kind of vagrant._

_Aw, Aunt Mimi, I can see just fine!_

Just like that Lydia saw a face – not blurry or indistinct, or incomplete like the Skeptical Man’s. A familiar, careworn face that meant home and safety and love. The bits and pieces, like a puzzle that had been scattered all over with the most important parts missing, finally coalesced into one whole – the world

_slipped—_

and just like that she knew.

At long last. She _knew._

Lydia realized that what she was feeling was shock – shock that now that she finally had the answer, it was all so… simple. It made sense. She released a breath that sounded like a sob, and wiped under her nose with the back of her sweaty hand. Now that she knew the score, the problem suddenly seemed so much bigger. There was so much to process, and she was too tipsy and thrumming with adrenaline to dig into it all with the gravity it deserved – and fuck it, with everything going on in her head, she was _still_ at her high school prom.

One thing at a time. She pulled herself back upright, having slumped against the bathroom stall, and took the time to steady her breathing and straighten out her wrinkled dress. Before she did anything else, there was one burning question that needed to be answered first.

The next thing Lydia was aware of, she was back in the ballroom. “Hey,” she shouted over the thumping music, putting her hand on Kevin’s arm. “I’m really not feeling well. I think I need to go home.”

“Home?” Kevin parroted dumbly. “It’s barely midnight. I thought we were gonna go to—”

“Well sure, I guess we still can, as long as you’re okay with me throwing up all over everybody.”

Kevin made a face. “Ugh, fine, come on.” He set down two punch glasses a bit more forcefully than required, and sullenly led her out of the ballroom. Their friends stopped them several times along the way to ask what was going on, and Kevin told them all they had to leave because Lydia was sick in such a passive-aggressive way that Lydia couldn’t wait to dump his selfish ass. But one thing at a time.

The air outside was cool and bracing, and the sound of ordinary everyday New York traffic soothed her in an unexpected way. Lydia turned her head in the direction where she knew the Dakota Building was, mere blocks away, imagining it jutting above her in the dark summer night. She briefly rethought her plans, but then looked back at Kevin. “You can stay if you want,” she decided. “I just want to go home.”

She used her emergency credit card to pay for a taxi, and sat in the back with her foot tapping. The drive home was interminable, through dense traffic – apparently their school wasn’t the only one having their prom this weekend – and by the time they reached quiet, sleepy Westchester Lydia jittered with impatience. She paid the driver and practically leapt out of the backseat, remembering at the last second she couldn’t make a sound; she didn’t want her parents to wake up and worry.

When she stepped through the back door into the kitchen, though, Travis was making himself a sandwich at the counter. He looked up at her, frowning, and glanced at the wall clock. “Isn’t it a little early for prom night to be over?” he asked. “Where’s your date?”

“He was being a huge jerk,” she said quickly, taking off her strappy heels. “Hey, don’t say anything about this to Mom and Dad, okay? I don’t want them to know anything’s wrong.”

Travis mumbled something and headed out to the den with his sandwich, clearly bored by her high school drama. Lydia tiptoed upstairs to her room and got straight to work.

First things first: she grabbed all the towels out of her laundry hamper, stuffing one under the bedroom door and draping the rest over her computer tower. Hands shaking, she then logged onto AOL. The towels muffled most of the noise from the modem as it beeped and buzzed its way onto the Internet, but she held her breath the entire time, just waiting for the telltale groan of the floorboards signaling that one of her parents had woken up. All was silence. So far so good. She put up a random away message on AIM, so she wouldn’t be distracted by the few friends who hadn’t been at prom and might wonder what she was up to at two in the morning. Her fingers trembled on the keyboard as she opened up the Yahoo! homepage and typed her keywords into the search bar.

Maybe some part of her already knew what she was going to find. There must have been some realistic, small voice that had been trying to tell her all along that she knew what was coming. But none of that mattered, because as soon as she clicked through the results and saw the headline _Lennon’s Aunt Mimi dies_ Lydia felt it physically, like she’d missed a step and fallen to her knees.

“No,” she moaned through tears. The article’s first line was blunt, almost clinical, the way Auntie would’ve preferred it: _Mary Elizabeth Smith, who helped raise John Lennon, died on Dec. 6. She was 88…_

She stared at the words until the letters became nothing but meaningless pixels on the screen. The strength drained from her body, leaving her to just wipe at the tears that poured down her cheeks, at the black stripes of mascara they left behind. How could this have happened? How could she have forgotten Mimi?

Lydia checked the year on the article: 1991. Less than eight years ago. She had been about a week shy of her eleventh birthday at the time, old enough to know, old enough to do something about it. If she’d only figured this all out sooner she could’ve called Mimi at her cottage in Poole, the way she used to every week, and let her know she was safe. She’d check in with her, make sure Auntie Meem was still getting on all right and didn’t need anything—

Lydia abruptly pushed her chair away from her desk and started pacing her bedroom, breathing hard. With everything so crazy and new (holy fuck she’d been reincarnated? and in her past life she’d been a _man?_ a really _famous man??_ ) a part of her had been hoping she could hear Mimi say it was going to be all right. _Stop that faffing about and get to work_ , _the sooner you begin the sooner it’s done,_ Mimi’d say, in her usual take-no-prisoners manner. She could be brusque but it hid a tender heart. Her words would make Lydia feel like whatever happened her aunt would be there, grimly determined to be supportive no matter what, and god help anyone who got in their way.

It made no difference now. She’d missed her chance. Aunt Mimi was gone, and Lydia hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye.

She buried her face in her hands, as the anguish burned in her eyes and nose and the back of her throat. Every muscle in her body seemed to contract at once, hardening her bottomless grief into a tangible shape, until she bent over under the weight of it all. What she wouldn’t give for one more phone call, just _one_ would’ve been enough—

A knock came at the bedroom door. Lydia snapped upright in panic, thinking it might be her mom or dad. “Y-Yeah?” she said.

“Lyd? Can I come in?”

She let out a shaky breath and scrubbed at her cheeks, then hurriedly logged out of AOL. “Uh, yeah, I’m decent.”

The door opened a crack and there was Travis, tired and confused. “The den’s right below your bedroom, you know,” he murmured.

“Oh. Sorry.”

He moved into her room and shut the door behind him. Lydia fidgeted, scrambling to come up with an explanation to cover why she was crying. “That guy Kevin was a real dick to you, huh,” Travis finally offered, after just looking at her a moment.

Relieved, Lydia nodded, even as more tears brimmed in her eyes. “Why do guys suck so much?” she asked him.

“Genetic, probably,” he said, which made Lydia chuckle a little. Travis stepped closer. “You need me to go hit him or something?”

She shook her head. “He’s not worth it. But thanks for offering.”

“You’re sure? Bet we could get Scott to drive down too, teach this guy a lesson.”

Lydia laughed again, wiping at her nose. “I’ll let you know if I change my mind.”

Travis shrugged, giving her a lopsided grin. He put an arm around her, pulling her into his solid form, and Lydia started crying again with her face buried in his shoulder. She knew she was probably getting makeup smeared all over his hoodie but he didn’t seem to care. He didn’t move an inch, just stood there and offered whatever comfort he could for as long as she needed. Because he was her big brother.

Later that night, once Travis had gone and she’d pulled on her pajamas and gotten into bed, she closed her eyes and conjured up a picture of Aunt Mimi. She could see the two of them seated in the front parlor together, the radio tuned to the BBC’s Light Programme, drinking tea from the everyday set – _not_ the nice one with the pink floral pattern that was just for guests and special occasions. They were reading different sections of the paper and giving each other a running commentary on the news of the day, making each other laugh. As she turned the memory over in her head, Lydia realized it was one of her very favorites – like an old photograph, creased and worn on the edges from being carried in a wallet.

A fresh wave of tears rose in her throat. _I love you and I miss you, Aunt Mimi_ , she thought, sending her positive energy out into the universe, _and I hope you’re safe and happy like me._

It would be an exhausting journey, she knew. Lydia’s grandfather had died when she was fourteen and it had been a long time before the loss of him wasn’t the very first thing she thought of when she woke up. Even though Mimi had died years earlier, the loss was as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. She had to mourn, remember, and move forward, and all without her parents catching on or asking questions. And now that Lydia knew the full scope of what was going on in her head – well, that would be a process too. It would take patience, and time, to figure out how to live her current life while being haunted by the memories of a past one, without losing her mind.

Telling the others never occurred to her. Not even for an instant.

(Not that night, at least.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PSA: Don't stop taking prescribed meds without discussing it with your physician. Take care of your brains and bodies, beauties.


End file.
